Man, The Terrorizers is such a fantastic film all around. And yes, the Blu-ray remaster is a thing of beauty. I's also strongly urge anybody interested in this to check out a few of the other films in that particular remaster series which happens to include Hou Hsiao-Hsien's brilliant Dust in the Wind, Tsai Ming-Liang's nearly equally brilliant Vive L'amour, and a couple others I haven't gotten chance to check out just yet. Though I've heard very good things about Chen Kuo-Fu's The Personals.

Good review Glenn. Hopefully seeing this tomorrow when I pull into D.C. then possibly a second time later this weekend with friends. Mainly for the Malick trailer *cough, looks around* but also because I love the look of the sensuous roaming camerawork I've seen in trailers and the promise of The Red Shoes meets Suspiria meets Repulsion meets The Company. Mmmhmm.

I shall not equivocate on either point: the film is nuts, and I love it. My review for MSN Movies is here. Fights have started already, and are likely to continue through the awards season and beyond. UPDATE: I was not nearly as taken with All Good Things, which I look at here.

You've pretty much just sold me on Tangled, Glenn. Until this point I honestly couldn't have cared less about it, since all the promotional material thus far has yes, reeked of Dreamworks, which was disappointing from a new DIsney film. Especially after The Princess and the Frog, itself a sort of new classic in my estimation, easily among the ranks of the studio's best films and a shining example of inspired top-quality classical 2D animation. Another initial disappointment regarding Tangled was merely seeing another 3D animation from Disney after such a glorious quasi-throwback in Princess. Then again, that screenshot above does quite a bit to sway me in the new film's favor. So yeah, thanks.

I was rather pleasantly surprised by Tangled, which begins with unpleasant intimations of Dreamworks but soon reveals itself as, to adapt a Godardian formulation, un vrai film Disney; the above still is from the film's very big set piece, a floating-lantern extravaganza that ranks as one of th...

My second favorite Assayas film quite easily, after the masterwork that is Irma Vep. Structurally the entire film is uneasy, and I feel a lot of your insights in this short piece and those from Assayas himself put a lot of my more visceral reactions to it in better context. I also felt during that conversation as the Japanese restaurant highlighted here there was some sort of barely-noticeable shift in the visual style of the film. Maybe something with the compositions or a filter, but it felt very slight, to correlate to the shift in narrative that occurs around that scene.

"It's not a movie that's very generous to its audience," My Lovely Wife observed when we discussed Olivier Assayas' 2002 film demonlover after it screened at the BAM Cinematek last night. She did not intend an insult. An irrational and blood-curdlingly convincing fever dream of corporate espio...

Carlos is good stuff, though I feel it begin to run out of direction, momentum... and possibly 'meaning' by the end? I look forward to the shorter version just the same. As far as his recent work though, I find a lot more to admire in his more formally audacious films like Demonlover and the incredibly Boarding Gate. Even Summer Hours, though a bit more of a call-back to his earlier themes and formal preoccupations and perhaps overshadowed by other similar films that came out at the time (thinking Still Walking, Flight of the Red Balloon), has quite a bit more to chew on than Carlos. Still, his film technique is as strong as ever, and the latter features quite a number of sheer bravura, breathless sequences.

Above, Julia Hummer as Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, also known as "Nada," in Olivier Assayas' Carlos, which opens this Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan and is showing on the Sundance Channel as well. I've watched the five-and-a-half hour picture twice now, and am completely convinced that ...

About a third of the way through this new film by Iranian director Abba Kiarostami, the character played by Juliette Binoche is sitting in a cafe in a tourist-laden Tuscan village when her male companion has to take a phone call, and he goes outside to talk on his cell. The proprieter of the...

Seeing this Sunday night at NYFF! Excellent write-up Glenn, and points well made. A lot of what you wrote here could just as easily be applied to Tropical Malady as well, which I'd urge people to check out. Especially in prepping for Boonmee, as I think the two will likely prove to share more similarities with each other than Boonmee will to Syndromes.
I'd also suggest checking out Joe's short A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which is stunning, as a sort of prologue/companion/parallel to the feature.

1) A couple of night before the New York Film Festival press screening of this picture, I was trying to prep a friend who would also be attending, and whose first Apichatong Weerasethakul this was to be. Bearing my impressions of Weerasethakul's great, but resistant-to-standard-film-critical...

Glen! I'm thrilled you decided to highlight his role in The American Friend. I've been thinking all day how underappreciated or at least underseen his role in that film is (not to speak of the film itself, one of my favorite from Wender). It's probably the most fully embodied and beautiful portrayals Hopper ever put to screen.

[Bumped and updated.] It was pretty widely known that Dennis Hopper had been terminally ill for some time; and for all that, I don't doubt there are those who are prone to speculate that his passing over this particular weekend was a final manifestation of his imp of the perverse, forcing bl...

Got alienation? From Antonioni's 1964 Red Desert, of course; grabbed off of the standard-def version of the new Criterion edition, which will also be on Blu-ray. Screen capture courtesy of the new CD/DVD drive installed to my computer by the fine and fast fellows at The Mac Support Store, a...

Malick not having a presence at the festival would certainly be a disappointment, but it's certainly not out of the question yet. I could see him pulling a maneuver much like Wong Kar-Wai with "2046", tinkering with the film until the very last minute before delivering it to Cannes... and then tinkering on it more until its actual release.
The obvious highlights of the competition are Weerasethakul and Kiarostami, and can we just give the former an award now and save everyone all the suspense, please?

This morning indieWIRE posted a report on the official announcements, thus far, concerning the Cannes FIlm Festival lineup this year. Some observations from where I sit: * At the moment, despite the presence of new films from Abbas Kiarostami, Bertrand Tavernier, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, t...